Following the announcement, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) said the measure is "expected to increase house prices" and has given it a "high" uncertainty rating.

The body says house prices will increase by 0.3% before adding that the main beneficiaries from the policy are people who already own property, not the buyers themselves.

Elsewhere in the speech Mr Hammond pledged to relax council borrowing rules, freeing up cash-strapped local authorities to build more homes.

He also revealed he would “give Local Authorities the power to charge a 100% council tax premium on empty properties.”

Turning to the Grenfell fire, he said there would be £28m to support survivors and extra cash for councils to spend on “essential fire safety work”.

“This tragedy should never have happened,” he added.

Rumours of sweeping planning reforms that would threaten the greenbelt did not come to fruition however, with the Chancellor reassuring MPs that any changes would “focus on the urban areas where people want to live and where most jobs are created.”

Mr Hammond also confirmed that the Government would aim to build 300,000 new homes a year.

TORY HOUSING RECORD

Previous flagship housing announcements that made headlines at the time remain undelivered, however, with David Cameron’s 2015 general election pledge to allow 1.3m housing association tenants to buy their homes still unrealised.

A year before that the Government announced a ‘Starter Homes’ scheme, which promised 100,000 first-time buyers the opportunity to buy a new home at a 20% discount, but as yet not a single one has been built.

Shadow Housing Minister, John Healey said: “Ministers’ record on housing since 2010 shows this is a government that talks big but delivers little. Even flagship manifesto pledges have been dropped or delayed.”